1. When you first addressed the issue of synaesthesia back in
the early 1970s, it was a relatively minor topic in psychology and
neuroscience, besides, a rather disreputable one. What initially
drew you to the phenomenon?

From the time of my graduate studies in the early 1960s, I’ve
been interested in the ways that information from different senses
combines and interacts, and in processes that are common to
different sense modalities. Until recently, not only synesthesia but
most of what we now call multisensory processing was considered well
outside the mainstream of sensory and perceptual science. For
generations, scientists tacitly assumed that every sense modality
operates largely or independently of the others and by its own
principles. But in graduate school, I was fortunate to have in my
department two eminent and heterodox scientists – S. S. Stevens, the
founder of modern psychophysics, and Georg von Békésy, Nobel
laureate in medicine for his research on mechanisms of hearing. Both
Stevens and Békésy were convinced that there are important
principles common to most or all of the senses. Although neither of
them ever mentioned synesthesia, not in my presence anyway,
nevertheless, synesthesia struck me as fitting well within the
framework of the “multisensory.” as being one manifestation of a
“unity of the senses” (to borrow that expression from Erich von
Hornbostel).

A few years later, in the early 1970s, I began to examine
synesthesia, especially auditory-visual synesthesia, and discovered
that some of the principles underlying the relations between the
inducing stimuli and the synesthetically induced sensations, or
inductants (to use Flournoy's term) are not unique to synesthesia,
but are widespread, if not quite universal. For example, most
sound-color synesthetes report that the brightness of the induced
color increases as the pitch of the inducing sound increases.
Exactly the same relation appears in a variety of perceptual
responses of most non-synesthetic perceivers (Aristotle and
Arcimboldo notwithstanding; see my response to question 4 below).
Non-synesthetes, by definition, do not “see” colors when they hear
sounds, but nevertheless they recognize and broadly agree on certain
cross-sensory similarities. I suggested many years ago that
synesthesia capitalizes on broad sensory and multisensory mechanisms
found in non-synesthetes too. My initial interest in synesthesia
came largely from my hope that studying it would shed light on
general principles of multisensory processing.

2. According to your position regarding synaesthesia, as
stated elsewhere, its "fundamental questions remain unanswered." Why
is synaesthesia such a hard nut to crack? What remains to be
discovered, you think, to reveal the essence of the phenomenon we
refer to as synaesthesia?

A full answer probably warrants a full-length chapter, even a
book. But let me try to respond as succinctly as I can, starting
with the second part of the question: What do we still need to learn
about the “essence” of synesthesia? This question presumes, of
course, that synesthesia has an essence, that synesthesia is, or can
be reduced to, a single common characteristic or conjunction of
characteristics. Assuming that synesthesia does have an essence,
What is it that makes all of the variants of synesthesia be
synesthesia, and differentiates synesthesia from other phenomena
with which it may share some characteristics (for instance, imagery,
including memory imagery; lucid dreaming; hallucination; etc)?

First we need to decide what is and what is not synesthesia:
Consider, as one example, the condition in which people report
tactile sensations on a region of the body when they see another
person being touched at an analogous location – what has been called
“mirror-touch synesthesia.” Certainly mirror-touch synesthesia has
several of the characteristics found in other forms of synesthesia –
an anomalous sensation (touch) induced by a stimulus to a different
modality (vision). What is peculiar to mirror-touch synesthesia,
relative to other kinds of synesthesia, is the fact that the what is
felt is so closely connected to the content of what is seen, in both
cases, someone being touched. In most forms of synesthesia, the
relation between inducer and inductant seems abstract, and not
particularly "ecological." Unlike most other forms of synesthesia,
in mirror-touch synesthesia inducer and inductant actually share a
common referent – a tactile sensation.

The mirror-touch phenomenon, to dub it more neutrally, seems
closely tied to empathy, as closely as to synesthesia. So if
mirror-touch is synesthesia, then perhaps so too are other sensory
forms of empathy, such as empathic pain, maybe even the couvade
syndrome. In the couvade syndrome, the partners of pregnant women
report symptoms, including sensory experiences such as nausea, that
are often associated with pregnancy itself. An important finding
about mirror-touch synesthesia is that it is often found in
association with other forms of synesthesia. This finding is taken
by some as evidence that mirror-touch should itself be considered a
variant of synesthesia. To the best of my knowledge, nothing is
known about a possible association between the couvade syndrome and
other forms of synesthesia. In any case, such associations are at
best only suggestive. Just because other forms of synesthesia are
associated with mirror-touch does not make mirror-touch a form of
synesthesia. Synesthesia may also be associated with creative
cognition, as Catherine Mulvenna has suggested, but this would not
mean that creative cognition is a variant of synesthesia.

I have suggested elsewhere that the boundaries between
synesthesia and other perceptual and cognitive processes may become
more clear when synesthesia is better understood, but one might turn
this argument around to say that we will not understand synesthesia
fully until we can better define it. In this regard, some
investigators have come to call constitutional synesthesia (as
opposed to synesthesia acquired by injury or illness) as a genetic
condition. Certainly there is mounting evidence for a genetic
predisposition to synesthesia, and several laboratories are actively
seeking specific genes associated with the presence of synesthesia.
One might imagine a time in the future when the broadly accepted
definition of synesthesia would relate it to the expression of
particular genetic alleles. My own suspicion is that the genes
involved in synesthesia code for proteins that control some basic
neurological processes, and that the alleles associated with the
presence of synesthesia are responsible for an ensemble of
neurological processes, synesthesia being a manifestation of just
one of them. If this scenario is correct, then in the end we may
need to continue defining synesthesia in phenomenological,
experiential terms – which is, after all, how synesthesia reveals
itself. Imagine the following future: We have uncovered all of the
genes associated with constitutional synesthesia, but nevertheless
find a few people who look talk like synesthetes, act like
synesthetes, and perhaps shown evidence (e.g., from neuroimaging) of
neural processes like those of synesthetes, but who lack any of the
associated genes. From my perspective, these individuals would
indeed be synesthetes. A tough nut to crack indeed!

3. Do you think synaesthesia is a phenomenal manifestation
restricted to humans only, or can it be experienced by other
cognitive forms (in animals)?

It’s funny that you should ask that question, as I used to pose
exactly the question to other researchers in synesthesia – often
simply by walking up to them at conferences and asking the question
directly and without warning, trying to catch their on-the-spot,
“gut” responses. Most of the answers that I received were
affirmative – but it’s important to keep in mind that I made my
inquiries several years ago, before it had become so common to
consider synesthesia as much or more in cognitive terms as in purely
sensory terms. In the past I too would have answered affirmatively,
but now I’m much less certain, especially given all of the recent
research implicating not only learning and experience but also
language in many instances of synesthesia. Perhaps, however, there
are several different forms of synesthesia, akin to the distinction
that Vilayanur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard made between lower
and higher synesthesia, and perhaps non-humans and humans share
lower forms but not higher one – for instance, pain-color and
sound-color, or even mirror-touch, but not word-flavor or number
forms. But, then, what would this mean for the definition of
synesthesia?

As you can see, I often start answering one question but end up
asking another one. My wife thinks this is part of my ethnic
upbringing, a style often found in Jewish households of a generation
and two ago: Ask “How are you?" and the answer is likely to be
something like: "So, how should I be?" More seriously, in
synesthesia one question does lead to another, in what seems to be
an unending chain. My hope is that a couple of good answers will
reverberate throughout.

Back to synesthesia in non-humans and humans: To the extent that
synesthesia is grounded in genetic mechanisms, and to the extent
that both non-humans and humans might experience some kinds of
synesthesia, non-humans and humans might share a genetic mechanism.
But the expression of this genetic mechanisms could vary across
species. We are just beginning to understand epigenetics: the ways
that environmental factors can affect genetic expression. In my
opinion, the deeper question, propaedeutic to the question of
non-humans vs. humans, is: Why does synesthesia exist at all? Is it
just some kind of historical (genetic) accident, propagated because
it does no harm, even if it may not provide any Darwinian benefit? (This
is possible, but personally I doubt it.) Might synesthesia be an
example of what Stephen Jay Gould called a “spandrel” – the
accidental outcome of a genetic mechanism responsible for something
else … perhaps a role in early neural development, maybe related to
pruning? (More likely.) Or might synesthesia actually confer a small
Darwinian advantage, if it is associated in some (causal) way with
cognitive processes that provide a little extra edge to information
processing. Perhaps synesthesia is associated with better memory or
– and this is a topic of long-standing interest, albeit few data –
creativity. I'm reminded of William James's attempt at explaining
free will by arguing that free will confers a modest functional
advantage; James suggested that free will might operate like a “hair
trigger” – playing a small role in decision-making on occasions
where a very small “nudge” is sufficient to push a person to decide
one way or another. I sometimes think of synesthesia as providing a
small adaptive “nudge.” Certainly this last possibility is
intriguing – but I’m not sure I believe it so much as wish it.

4. In Cretien van Campen's book on synaesthesia, he points out
that Arcimboldo's and Aristotle's were reverse correspondences of
musical tones and colours (i.e. high-pitch tones to a darker palette)
relative to our current habitual associations (high-pitch to lighter
colours). Besides, there are other sensorial relationships recorded
both in and outside western culture strikingly different from those
of ours. How do you explain such possible mismatches in terms of
synaesthetic mechanisms?

From Crétien’s account, Arcimboldo may have come up with his
scheme based on a formal conception rather than perception. Perhaps
Aristotle did too.

But let me start with another example. Many years ago, I was
studying cross-modal correspondences in preschool-aged and
school-aged children. One set of correspondences of interest
comprised the associations of color with temperature – the
well-known “warm” and “cool” colors. When we began to test children
in the age range 6-10 years, we discovered that very few showed the
normative (adult-like) associations of reds and oranges as warm
colors, blues and greens as cool colors. Most of the children seemed
to respond randomly, although a few did not. When we inquired
further of those children who responses did show the normative
pattern, all of them mentioned that in school they had been
explicitly taught the correspondences. We soon discontinued the
study, but other investigators have reported that color-temperature
associations become stable developmentally only around the time of
adolescence. It has long been argued that these associations are
universal because they are based on physical regularities in the
world – for example, because bodies of water feel cool to the touch
and are generally seen as blue. But the correspondences aren’t
perfectly universal. On several occasions, I’ve observed scientists
use red colors in their graphs to represent lower temperatures and
blue colors to represent higher ones, reversing the normative
direction. I’ve also occasionally stayed in hotels in which the warm
faucet was labeled with blue and the cold faucet with red, to my
great displeasure. If some people don’t learn the normative
associations (assuming they are learned), then these individual may
use other criteria besides the physical correlation to form their
cross-sensory representations.

But what of pitch and lightness? I’ve found, in children as young
as 4 years, who hadn’t yet learned the words for low and high pitch,
a near universal correspondence between higher pitch and greater
lightness, just as I find in synesthetic and non-synesthetic adults.
Catherine Mulvenna found the same correspondence amongst the Himba
tribes-people of Namibia, who have virtually no contact with Western
culture. If, as I proposed many years ago, the synesthetic
correspondence between the pitch of sounds and the lightness of
colors is hard-wired, deriving from basic neural mechanisms of
sensory coding in hearing and vision, then why would it not be
absolutely universal? I can only suggest a couple of possible
explanations, which I freely admit are pure guesses. One possibility,
suggested earlier, is that a given individual may bypass perceptual
similarity by using a formal or theoretical scheme to construe or
construct cross-sensory correspondences. Another possibility is that
a given individual may experience incidental associations of sound
and color that go in the opposite direction to the norm, and this
individual may then “imprint on” her or his idiosyncratic
experiences.

In many, perhaps most, forms of synesthesia, learning plays a
critical role – obviously, one must learn letters, numbers, and
words, before one has, for instance, grapheme-color or word-flavor
synesthesia. In non-synesthetes, learning appears critical to the
development of some sensory correspondences (as in color-temperature).
How do cultures come to adopt novel sensory correspondences?
Anthropology provides possible explanations within several
theoretical frameworks: functionalist, structuralist, etc. From a
structuralist perspective, variations in patterns of sensory
correspondence might represent differences only in surface
structures, but not necessarily in deep structures. But these
considerations take us too far afield. In any case, even if
pitch-brightness correspondences are in some sense hard-wired, this
does not mean that heredity is always destiny.

As I've said, I believe that the pitch-lightness correspondence
in synesthetes and in non-synesthetes comes from a common source –
an idea first expounded by Theodore Karwoski and his colleagues more
than 75 years ago, which I endorsed in my writings in the 1970s, and
which has been picked up more recently by Jamie Ward. Nevertheless,
we still don’t fully understand the relationship between
pitch-lightness similarity in non-synesthetes and pitch-lightness
correspondence in synesthetes. That they are related I have no doubt;
how they are related is less clear, and understanding how they are
related is critical to explaining “mismatches.” "Mismatches" could
have different sources in synesthetes and non-synesthetes. A
non-synesthete may, for instance, construe cross-sensory
correspondences based on a logical or mathematical or conceptual
framework that simply bypasses perceptual similarity. As Crétien
also points out in his book, Newton did something like this when he
proposed 7 primary colors for the spectrum, thereby matching the
number of colors to the number of notes of the musical scale. The
ability to transcend or transform either neurophysiologically or
environmentally engendered correspondences is a hallmark of
originality and creativity.

5. In your paper "Synesthesia across the Spectrum" you ponder
that the way one interprets synaesthesia is per se indicative of the
interpreting researcher's mind and method. In your view, have there
been similar correspondences throughout the history of synaesthesia
research? Specifically, how the attitudes to and understandings of
synaesthesia as a phenomenon of the human mind can characterise the
state of cognitive and psychological sciences as such?

Scientists all have their own metaphors for understanding the
world, especially those parts of the world that they study. Many of
these metaphors are shared, and tend to come from physical science
and, especially, from technology – in brain/behavioral science, an
important shared metaphor of a century ago was the
brain-as-a-telephone-switchboard, a guiding metaphor in the hay-day
of associationistic thinking. With the development of computers in
the middle of the last century, brain and mind came to be
conceptualized within the language of computer science. It’s hard to
avoid uses certain locutions, such as how such-and-such a circuit in
the brain "computes" this or that – even though I still often cringe
when I hear it. After all, computers “compute” because of the way we
interpret the binary outputs. Of course, when we talk about
computers we're generally talking about one specific kind of
computer, namely, digital computers. Early in my career, I had the
opportunity to work with analog computers, which are quite wonderful
devices for modeling much of the world. There are a few
neuroscientists and others who recognize the potential significance
of analog processes – which were championed by the Gestalt
psychologists. Wolfgang Köhler relied on analog processing in his
theory of the isomorphism between the brain and perception/behavior.
This may seem a digression from your question, but it’s isn’t – at
least, not completely. I’ve always thought of synesthesia as an
implicit system of analogies, although I never tried to develop a
formal model.

This leads me to your next question.

6. Taking advantage of my initiative to interview you, I can't
help asking you about my own model of the neurophysiologic basis of
synaesthesia that I first advanced at the 2009 Granada conference to
which you had been invited as the key speaker. How viable you think
might be a vision that theorises wide-scale oscillation across
multiple frequency bands as the integrative neuronal foundation of
synaesthetic coherences?

Absolutely: There are long-standing hypotheses regarding the ways
that coherence in temporal frequency of oscillation could provide a
basis to perceptual binding (in non-synesthetic perception), and
these accounts could readily extend to synesthesia too. Coherence in
multiple frequency bands seems to me essential. In fact, this might
provide a relatively simple account of synesthetic correspondences.

7. By this point, it will have become clear to the reader that
you are not a synaesthete (the question that haunts most
synaesthetes when running into an inquisitive neuroscientist). Have
you ever regretted not being one? Would it give you a competitive
edge in your research?

Of course I'd love to be a synesthete! There are several reasons
for this. One is pure curiosity: What is it like to experience
synesthesia in the first person? I'm not sure how much of a
competitive edge being a synesthete would give to my scientific work,
but to the extent that I'd be satisfied with experiments using a
single subject, I'd have one constantly available. On the other side
of this coin, there's the risk that my synesthesia might mislead me
to believing that my own phenomenal experiences necessarily
characterize synesthesia in general. And as to regretting not being
a synesthete, no, I don't regret it, no more than I don't regret not
looking like Paul Newman. Oh. Um. Wait a moment: I take this back.

8. Almost all the dominant theories consider the phenomenon of
synaesthesia strictly in terms of “involuntary reactions.” It is
only recently that some researchers and theorists have started
integrating the semantic correlations and agency into their
perspectives. What is your take on the relations between
synaesthesia and human creativity in general?

A traditional view of synesthesia sees it as consisting of
involuntary, automatic responses to inducing stimuli. A prototypical
example of synesthesia is colored hearing – the arousal by an
acoustic stimulus of color sensations (synesthetic) as well as the
usual auditory sensations of pitch, loudness, and so on (non-synesthetic).
This view fits comfortably within the (also traditional)
stimulus-response physiologies that developed from the seventeenth
century into the psychologies that emerged in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. In applying this scheme to
colored-hearing synesthesia, an acoustic stimulus would be an
inducer, which automatically leads to both non-synesthetic auditory
sensations and concurrent synesthetic color sensations. By this
account, synesthesia is involuntary, and doesn't require intent on
the part of the individual.

I see (at least) three important issues raised by this
traditional view.

First, there is an implicit sense in this view that the
synesthetic and non-synesthetic sensory responses both reflect
relatively low-level processes. Contrary to this view is the growing
evidence that synesthetic responses often/typically depend on
semantic content, on meanings, evidence that is hard to reconcile
with the implicit view. All of the terrific work of Julia Simner and
others shows a clear role of language and semantic networks in the
development of several kinds of synesthesia, especially flavor
responses to words (presented either acoustically or optically). To
be sure, synesthetic sensations (colors, flavors, or whatever) arise
fairly rapidly after presentation of the inducer (although not as
rapidly as the primary sensations), but so too do meanings; The
meanings of words are processed rapidly, and the neural processing
of meaning undoubtedly overlaps in time the processing of low level
sensory features. So if linguistic meanings come to be activated
quickly and (more or less) automatically, why not also synesthetic
sensory qualities? I think there is indeed a great deal of "automaticity"
in the arousal of synesthestic perceptions. Note, however, the
qualifier: "Great deal" does not mean 100%. This leads to the next
issue.

Second, what does it mean to be involuntary? Must
involuntary-ness be absolute? Almost certainly, some voluntary
control over synesthesia is possible, or more than possible. Once
more, let's take a diversion, to the domain of attention to
perceptual stimuli, where there is another “traditional” view,
namely, that the presentation of a stimulus may briefly direct
attention automatically or involuntarily. This exogenous kind of
directed attention is commonly contrasted with endogenous attention,
which is voluntary and controlled. So, for example, a flash of light
initially produces an automatic, exogenous direction of attention to
the location of the flash, lasting about a tenth of a second,
followed by another perhaps also automatic direction of attention
away from the location of the flash (inhibition of return), this
lasting a few tenths of a second, after which the person may
voluntarily use the location of the light flash to direct attention
to that same site or another one.

A very neat story this. It is complicated, however, by evidence
that even in the first few tenths of a second, during the period(s)
in which attention is driven exogenously, people have some voluntary
control over visual spatial attention. So most is not all.
Nevertheless, distinctions can be valuable, even when they are not
perfect. Synesthetic colors arise much more automatically than do
many forms of visual imagery, as imagery can depend to a great
extent on voluntary agency.

Let's move away from the example of sound-induced colors to
consider other phenomena, such as number forms: Many people have
strong spatial representations of numbers, not necessarily linear or
even unidimensional represenatations; Francis Galton reported on
number forms more than a century ago, and many researchers consider
number form to be a variant of synesthesia. Interestingly, the
stimuli that induce number forms might be external – hearing or
reading the words or numbers themselves – but the inducers may also
be internal. If a person with number forms thinks about a sequence
of numbers, then the inducers are voluntary, and so too in a sense
are the inductants. I may be able to “voluntarily” albeit indirectly
affect my blood pressure by thinking about events that lead,
themselves automatically, to either vasoconstriction or
vasodilatation in peripheral blood vessels. In their wonderful old
studies of synesthesia, back in the 1940s, Karwoski, Odbert, and
Osgood described what they considered several variants of
sound-color and sound-shape synesthesia, noting that some kinds of
synesthesia were under much more voluntary control than others.
Since then, researchers in synesthesia have become increasingly
reluctant to include the voluntary cases as instances of true
synesthesia – another example of the problems surrounding
definitions. If synesthesia is defined as being primarily or largely
automatic, then voluntary synesthesia is impossible. Maybe, however,
following Karwoski et al., there are different kinds of synesthesia,
some primarily automatic, others much more voluntary.

How might this link to creativity? The notion that synesthesia is
somehow connected to creativity has a long history – suggested in
large measure by the substantial number of writers, composers, and
artists who are, were, or may have been synesthetes. The connections
are not well established, however, and there are the well-known
pitfalls associated with bias in sampling and reporting. But there
is an even deeper issue here that continues to gnaw at me. One of
the prime characteristics of synesthesia – often used as a
diagnostic criterion in scientific research – is long-term
consistency: Synesthetic correspondences tend to be fixed, rigid,
invariant, constant over periods of months, years, even decades. How
seemingly uncreative!

It is not clear to me how synesthesia per itself would contribute
to creativity, to creative acts, beyond providing a set of
experiences to depict in visual, verbal, or perhaps musical form.
But does being synesthetic make one generically more creative? The
recognition of synesthesia, the appreciation of the ways that the
human mind, through the nervous system, can connect different
domains, now that is a mental characteristic that might contribute
to creativity – as it is part and parcel of the role of metaphorical
thinking, critical to at least certain kinds of creativity. I
tentatively explored some of these possible connections more than
three decades ago in my book, The Unity of the Senses, and other
researchers in synesthesia, such as Richard Cytowic and Vilayanur
Ramachandran, have expanded these notions. Of course, in one sense,
our lives are filled with creative acts. As the linguist Noam
Chomsky pointed out half a century ago, each of us, every day,
undoubtedly utters several new sentences, sentences that we have
neither heard before nor spoke or wrote before. The use of language
is quintessentially creative in this sense, even if most of us speak
most of the time in a prose that is inelegant, and often
ungrammatical – though creative nonetheless. (Sometimes, to be sure,
the ungrammatical may be poetic, and quite lovely, as in Dylan
Thomas's "a grief ago," the first line of the poem of the same title.)
I’m not sure how much synesthesia itself may add to creativity, but
it is plausible that the mechanisms underlying synesthesia – the
genetic mechanisms in particular – contribute to creativity, so that
synesthesia and creativity are associated although not necessarily
causally connected.

9. To your mind, how trustworthy might neuroimaging seem? What
are the interpretative and descriptive limits of its reliability in
synaesthesia research?

When functional neuroimaging first came on the scene, I was
greatly skeptical – in part because many of the early studies struck
me as trivial. If you have an essentially materialistic view of the
universe, including biology, then you believe, at a minimum, that
there are physical bases to all behavioral and mental phenomena. So
every mental or behavioral act must be associated with a physical
process, especially processes in the brain. Many early studies using
functional neuroimaging were of the "gee-whiz-we-can-see-something-different-in-the-brain-when-behavior-changes"
sort. Relatively few of the early studies, in my view, actually shed
any new light on brain mechanisms or processes. In recent years, the
situation has changed for the better, as functional neuroimaging has
been wedded to increasingly sophisticated behavioral paradigms. In
addition, PET imaging makes it possible, for example, to examine the
release of different neurotransmitters, and gives relatively good
spatial resolution; magnetic neuroimaging gives better temporal
resolution. On the other hand, all of the techniques for
neuroimaging remain fundamentally limited. None of them can show the
flow of neural information in anything approaching real time, nor
can they show the necessary details of neural processing over the
complex networks of the brain. This is a real limitation. There are
also technical issues having to do with how one calculates the
baseline for measuring changes, for example, in the blood flow (BOLD)
responses measured in fMRI. Neuroimaging techniques undoubtedly miss
lots of important processes, faiing to give information about
temporal coding in the nervous system, etc.

But practitioners of neuroimaging understand the limitations. I
tend to be more concerned over the way that findings in neuroimaging
are often “overbought” by (and sometimes "oversold to") the media
and public at large. It is ironic that synesthesia owes its
currently improved image in both the scientific community and the
broader intellectual community in large measure to neuroimaging,
which “proved” to many skeptics that synesthesia is “real.” There
really is a lot to the old adage that “seeing is believing.”

10. How have your scientific activity and achievements
throughout all your career as a neuroscientist both in the domain of
synaesthesia and sensory psychophysics influenced you as a
personality and human being?

My scientific activities and achievements are part and parcel of
who I am; they express my thinking and my beliefs on a variety of
topics: on perception and language, on science and philosophy, on
culture (Western, mainly) and its history. The way I approach
scientific topics reflects how I think, not just how I think about
science. I'm not sure I want to try to figure out whether and how my
scientific activities influence my personality, my humanity; whether
and how my personality, knowledge, and beliefs influence my
scientific activities. The dynamism is understood at least as well
from the outside as from the inside, from a third-person rather than
first-person perspective. Half of one drawer in my desk at home
contains drafts of dozen or so short stories that I have written and
rewritten over the last 20 years or so (none being anywhere near “finished”).
Often, after drafting a story, I experience an “aha” moment: that,
although not aware of this while writing, nevertheless, the story
was “really” – symbolically, metaphorically – about some past events,
but transformed unconsciously, along lines that Freud would
presumably have appreciated. But the “aha” moments and the stories
are all constructions all, stories all, “stuff as dreams are made on.”
From my inner perspective, what is most important is that the
stories satisfy me. And, in the end, what's better than a good
story?